


Book of the Moon

by Chromat1cs



Series: Basingstoke Diaries [16]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Grief/Mourning, M/M, Marauders' Era, Post Hogwarts AU, The Author Regrets Nothing, Young Harry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-06-08 13:42:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15244647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: Sirius has never had to truly let go before, which feels strange after twenty-eight years but here it is. Grief is strange.Fate is stranger.





	Book of the Moon

_If you got a lull,_   
_I’ll be your sail;_   
_Find the light source_   
_In the storm of your head._

_Gone for three days,_   
_Just like the moon;_   
_Voices echo_   
_In the back of the night._

_There is no war,_   
_There is no pain_   
_In the first place;_   
_We are born again…_

—Fionn Regan, “Book of the Moon” from _The Meetings of the Waters_

 

—

 

Remus Lupin has died.

Remus Lupin has died and Sirius Black is still alive, and neither of them were, or are, or even were about to be old enough for any of it to be commonplace.

It still doesn’t sit right in the air after two days of ruminating.

It will never sit right in the air.

Sirius stares at the wall without seeing it for the third afternoon in a row since the cremation because nothing feels real, nothing will ever feel real, he can’t sleep, he can’t cry, he can’t believe his own senses—every smell reminiscent of Remus feels like a cruel joke, every shape of the flat searing if it once touched the dead man’s body as he sat, slept, laughed, cried, came, sighed, any bloody fucking thing that smacked of living.

None of it feels real.

None of it... _feels._

 _Come stay with us,_ James had urged him gently after they’d spread Remus’ ashes on the beach _, I don’t want you to be alone like this._

 _I do,_ Sirius had wept, the last bout of tears it seemed that his body might ever produce again after the endless liters of the stuff he had expelled through the days and nights previous. Staring out at the ocean as dusk crawled in was like a baptism in fire—every feeling cauterizing to cap off the ends of his nerves, leaving the overall convex bend of Sirius’ perception dull and muted.

If he never has to feel again, it would be too soon.

Sirius had owled Lyall with a shaking hand the morning after Remus passed, stilled body covered with a sheet on their bed—his bed; _Don’t look at it, don’t lift the corner of that fucking shroud, if you see him pallid it’s real and this is not real, this is a nightmare._

 _You’re welcome of course to the ceremony, he wanted to be spread at the little beach in Wexford,_ Sirius had suggested toward the tail of his letter, the cremation set to be just beyond the property he had only seen once as a boy before the Lupins moved to the home Lyall now kept. _But I understand either way. Regardless, I would like to see you someday soon._

Lyall’s response had been swift across the windowsill and painfully brief: _Thank you, Sirius, but I feel that being there may be too devastating for a heart that’s lost much in this way already. Please do owl again when you’re ready, I think it would do for us both to visit._

And so there it stands.

Remus is ashes across the Atlantic, and Sirius doesn’t know what the fuck to do with himself besides try to remember how to feel his heartbeat beyond the crust of numb and aimless white noise.

It was never supposed to end like this.

Sirius casts his eyes across the room, blinking as he takes in the strange shapes of home half-deadened now, and feels them prickle suddenly with tears for the first time since the funeral when he sees the book splayed out like a pinned moth on the sofa’s arm, unnoticed and unfinished in the foggy haze of Remus’ last hours of existence.

 _Poetry_ , its pages sitting for three bloody days as if somebody would be coming in to pick it up and continue reading any moment now.

The blankets from that night are still tangled on the floorboards in front of the cold hearth.

The wine bottle, emptied and rolled to its side, and two dregs-stained glasses still sit in the maddening quiet.

Sirius hadn’t noticed them in his own hecticism of loss.

He crumples like parchment and weeps as he tries and fails, again and again, to tell himself he’ll just wake up in a matter of several hours.

He loses the image of the flat through the squall of grief. Sirius curls in on himself there in the armchair, heels of his hands over his eyes, and shuts himself down from the inside out.

He’s never been good at loneliness, but this is too much. This is the forced journey of learning, the impossible and painful grip of reality spitting in his face as he slides down its sheerest cliff yet. He wasn’t ready—he _isn’t_ ready. He can’t do this.

Nothing feels.

Nothing fucking feels.

—

_I see you._

_I see you sealing yourself away like this and I can do nothing._

_I’m still new beyond this fold and I can’t touch you, I can’t make it clear that I‘m here._

_I’m right here, Sirius._

_I watch you retreat into yourself and I try to flutter the curtains, shuffle the records, anything—nothing. Still too barely-there._

_Perhaps when I’ve been gone for longer you might see me._

_Funny, that—I could be more real for you the longer I’ve been away from you._

_All I can do is wait. And watch._

_The flat looks smaller from here._

—

Once Sirius can finally drag himself out of his guts and into the greying land of the living, he progresses to reading the Prophet over weak coffee in the evenings when he’s run out of things with which to distract himself.

The way Sirius faces the martial advancement of hours now is practiced, like some gauche stage play without a single direction written in its margins besides “Exist.”

Sirius can exist exceedingly well, but he doesn’t have to like it.

Tonight's paper is droll as ever, the words bouncing harmlessly off his blunted attention like pithy hailstones. _Minister Bagnold to Hold Awareness Council; London Wizard Found!; Townhouse For Sale, See Page 12 for Inquiries; New Trial to Begin for Wolfsbane D—_

Sirius’ heart seizes violently, a shock of feeling so intense and out of the ordinary that it makes him gasp aloud as if it had been a knife sliding between his ribs. The shape of the word “Wolfsbane” rips at his viscera, reminding him freshly of the pain of last week’s full moon—the first since Remus’ departure, a quiet evening that had no business being as still as it had been. Sirius had blasted Bowie to drown out the racket of his own sorrow until the downstairs neighbors hammered at the floor with a sharp tattoo of annoyance.

Sirius stares at the headline as his pulse hammers in his chest with raw disbelief, like the butt of a broomstick coming from downstairs:

_New Trial to Begin for Wolfsbane Draught at St. Mungo’s Hospital._

He tears through the periodical to reach the story’s given page with his heart in his throat. _No, no, no, fucking NO—_ Sirius scours the columns until he finds the article, and time seems to slide to pieces around him as he reads with trembling hands;

 _As part of Chief Healer Squill‘s motion for inclusivity at St. Mungo’s Hospital in London, the board has announced that beginning this week, registered Dark Creatures will be extended treatment options for the first time in the hospital’s history through a new wing completed just last month. Chief Squill’s first motion can be seen as an olive branch of sorts, as he famously lost a sister to a werewolf bite in 1964 and has previously been a figurehead for motions to curtail the rights of Dark Creatures in healthcare. However, activists have been hard at work for St. Mungo’s to recognize the concerns of non-practicing cursed individuals and their efforts seem to have earned the sympathy and attention of Chief Squill. Registered werewolves will be among the first group offered treatment with licensed batches of Wolfsbane, a potion  that—_  

Sirius has to stop reading as he clenches the edges of the paper in tightening fists. Six weeks. If Remus had managed to wait six bloody fucking ruddy shitting weeks, he could have been in that trial and gotten proper treatment for the first time in his life. Never mind the registering, a minor fact they probably would have argued about handsomely, but he could have _gotten treatment._ If they had waited six weeks then Remus could still be here, in this sitting room, quiet over tea but doubtless wide-eyed at the article and the sudden turn of the tide toward people like him, he could be living, he could _still be living._

Sirius feels the aimless, raging shout leave his lungs before he hears it through his fog of utter fury.

The newspaper rips between his fists like dried petals. Sirius squeezes his fingers around the scraps to feel them compress in his palms, jagged folds biting into his skin as if in begging resistance, and he squeezes and chokes the refuse until his knuckles go white and his throat hurts from roaring at nothing. He frees the paper lamely to the floor—dead, dying, limp—and aims immediately for something else to destroy.

Sirius Black is no stranger to boiling anger. It was his default as a child, bottling up the years of abuse and turmoil to char his insides and let it burst out like wildfire when it rose too steeply in his guts and caused meltdown after racketing meltdown. Remus and James and Pete had first taught him how to shunt it healthily when they were 11 — _Shout into the pillow, just try it. Then try punching the pillow. Well d’you want to punch_ me _instead?_ Casual violence aside, they were magnificent at giving Sirius new ways to express himself instead of kicking off in the dormitory every couple of weeks.

It’s been so agonizingly long since Sirius has had anything to truly be furious at. He’s almost forgotten how to explode.

But his bones, writ deep at their marrow with the ire of his ancestry, remember it well.

The first thing to crash to the floor is the armchair. Sirius heaves it over with a satisfying lurch that roils in his guts, its clamorous drop echoing somewhere in the roots of his teeth to resonate sickly-sweet with the pain lighting up his nerves like sparklers. Seeing red, feeling all of 9 years old on the inside and perfectly helpless, Sirius moves next to the sofa and topples it with effort that makes his arm muscles keen with resistance. He realizes, somewhere between the hulking mass of cushions groaning with his push and thumping heavily to its side with its skirts askew like some French dancer, that he’s still shouting at the empty nothing of the flat as if it could do anything. It does nothing but make his voice raw. He keeps shouting.

A shelf of books—his books, old school books and the stacks of Muggle periodicals he used to read with Remus—flies to the floor next. Sirius’ arms sweep like the violent bolt of a spell to scatter them at his feet, spines flopping open to vomit skewed pages and creasing gloss photos across the floorboards. It hurts something deep inside Sirius to see the piling chaos, but it doesn’t hurt enough to stop. His circulatory system still feels as though it’s been lit with gasoline.

He barrels into the bedroom and rips the sheets from the mattress to fling them to the floor, hurls the old bedside lamp down after them to watch and hear it shatter to pieces. The memory of bringing it back to the new flat from some odd estate sale years ago cracks alongside it at the back of his mind. Sirius’ entire body trembles with the shock of destruction as he continues through the flat.

The contents of the medicine box. A stack of poorly-folded laundry. The charmed fourth hand on the grandfather clock in the sitting room that had tracked the lunar cycles for him. Every coat of his hanging on the coat tree. Several plates, all the chairs, a potted plant from Pete in sympathy left on the kitchen table next to its unopened card. Each finds its way to the floor by Sirius’ hands, throwing and heaving and dashing everything fit for it as he tears through the flat. Aimless curses leave his lungs in jagged screams, baseless fury flying through the air like banshees, riding the heels of his anguish to accompany the ruin of the empty space. Sirius only stops when he returns to the bedroom, when he realizes through the inferno in his brain that the only things left to shatter are those that belonged to Remus. 

Nothing of Remus’ has ever deserved abuse.

Remus never deserved any of this.

Sirius stands in the bundle of sheets before the naked mattress, yanked askew on the bed frame from his wrenching pull to rip off the covers. His arms are still trembling but his fury is fading, and a sickening wave of grief surges up in his guts to take it over as he sinks to his knees. Desperate for something to hold, in the absence of the warmth he misses like an entire half of his heart, Sirius gathers up armfuls of the bedclothes and hugs them close. His shouting turns to bawls, full-bodied and hideous, the sort of sobbing that makes one feel like retching, and apologizes over and over again to the eaves.

“I’m sorry,” he weeps, “I’m so sorry, Remus.”

Sirius has always known that anger is ephemeral.

He has never had to discover before now that deep-clawed sorrow is far more permanent.

—

_You rage as if the world is coming down around you._

_I count three chairs, several plates, half the bedroom, and more than a few books that find their way through the shape of my body in this aether, and I don’t blame you one bit. You can’t see me. You aren’t aiming for me. It reminds me of goading you to hit me when we were boys; I wasn’t surprised it worked, but you refused to ever do it again, remember?_

_Trust me, love—if I could have razed the world to the ground before I went, I would have. But I’ve always lacked your conviction._

_So I watch you do the microcosm of damage that you’re able to, accidentally careful in a haphazard sort of way to only ruin your own things. Not mine. Never mine._

_Even at your worst, you have always done your damnedest to guard me._

_I adore you, you terrible hurricane of utter humanity._

—

Lyall’s kitchen has hardly changed in the years between the last time Sirius was over to mourn.

Sirius arrived early that afternoon, hollowed but desperate to speak about it—a rarity. Perhaps being rocked to his core has truly thrown Sirius, bodily, from his axis. He and Lyall had embraced in greeting as Sirius crossed the hearth, and they had both cracked into silent tears together where they stood in the sitting room for several minutes. Holding one another, clinging, father to just-as-well-as-son; from such far reaches of life but sewn together with the garish and terrible thread of Remus’ d— _Don’t say it._

Empathy, sympathy, whatever it could be called. It was welcome.

Cleansed. What an odd thing to feel in this cocktail of nothingness over the past two months.

Lyall had been the first to break the hold, swiping beneath his glasses at reddened eyes to gesture to the kitchen for “Tea?” Subsisting on very little besides weak French press and toast had gotten old, so Sirius followed the man into the hovel like a wastrel following for shelter.

Sitting now across from one another, Sirius thinks with a tug in his stomach back to 1979. A year so shot through with live-wire open-endedness that it pains him to draw up the images in his memory: Remus’ face in this same kitchen a carful blur of blankness in his subconscious as he murmurs _“I love you”_ for the first time; the feeling of the paling sun through the curtains that haven’t changed in almost a decade; the taste of Lyall’s earl grey. Only two of those constants cool rather than burn Sirius’ aching spirit. 

The men speak of simplicities for a long time then, the stripped-bare hurt of relearning life without its nucleus for either of them leaving their individual vocabularies severely stunted beyond the most basic things. How is Lyall dealing, Just Fine. How is Sirius getting by on his own, No Worse Than Expected. It’s a feigned dance that Sirius is quite good at, until Lyall prods at Sirius’ unfulfilling answers once more in a way that stabs right past all the sodden defenses and straight to his core.

“It took me a long time to cope after Hope passed,” Lyall states carefully. He speaks with steady gentleness, as if he’s afraid his words could wake an infant in the next room. “But you’ll find, I think, that time will distance you from it. You won’t forget him—you’ll never forget him, but you’ll forget how badly it hurts.”

Sirius ignores the instinct to insist he doesn’t ever _want_ to forget the hurt; he wants to keep slaking himself with these incessant hot coals of grief to punish himself for taking any second in his life with Remus for granted. But he knows it’s a petulant argument that would only hurt Remus’ father far too deeply. He settles for more questions.

“How,” Sirius asks, stark and blank as tearing parchment. He stares into the fluttering shallows of his teacup and tries not to erupt with the fury from last week, and half of his mind faintly imagines tearing this kitchen apart—table out the window, chairs into the fireplace, tea set to the floor in a great shattering of all things delicate and beautiful. He squeezes his eyes shut briefly before looking up at Lyall, desperate to learn the placidity in those dark green eyes that remind him so intensely of Remus that it almost joins the smolder at the base of his throat. Almost. “How do I keep on without him until then?”

“There’s no right way to do it,” Lyall murmurs, sad and wry and thrumming with the ache of commiseration.

“Does it at least get easier?” Sirius concedes. Part of him presses to detail it—Does it ever get easier to wake up to an empty bed, empty home, empty heart; does it get easier to breathe when the little things remind you of them; does it get easier when all you want to do is be touched again but you can’t because ashes can’t smooth away that ache under your skin—but Lyall understands the leagues of words going unsaid and simply shakes his head.

“No. But you’ll get stronger in the face of it.”

Sirius is quiet for several long seconds then before his heart quivers alight the phrase that’s been building itself on his tongue for weeks; “It should have been me.”

Lyall suddenly sets his tea down with a clatter, pulling Sirius’ attention to see the man looking stoney-faced as he points viciously at Sirius. “Sirius Black, don’t you dare.”

The warning is so full of offense, like reacting to the touch of a firebrand, that Sirius almost drops his saucer.

“Life does not work like that, you are not a piece to be bargained away,” the man says intently. His expression is stormy, furious with passion Sirius has never seen in him before. “Misfortune is a balance, Sirius, and just because it tips to one side doesn’t mean it won’t tip _right_ bloody back.”

“I’m sorry, Lyall, I—“

“I lose my son’s supposed future to Greyback,” Lyall barrels on, all purpose, ignoring Sirius’ bid for pause as he leans forward in his chair and begins to tick off his fingers with pointed intensity, “but in return I get a boy—brilliant, lovely, beautiful little boy—who teaches me to learn empathy and joy in spite of the hell on earth he was served. I lose my job, but I learn how life works better outside of a broken and rotting Ministry. I lose my wife, but I gain a connection with my son so much deeper and full of understanding than I ever could have asked. I lose my _son—”_

Sirius’ throat clenches madly as Lyall chokes up, steels himself with a breath and a shaky purse of his mouth, but forges on through the foggy press of tears.

“I lose my son, the _one_ thing I think I have left to keep me together,” he insists hoarsely as his extended index finger and thumb left hanging in the air begin to shake, “but now I’ve the knowledge of how much he loved me, loved _you,_ Sirius, to keep me afloat. You have to do the same, you—you can’t j—” Lyall stammers and tries to hold it in before he breaks and gives himself a moment to weep, the weathered tears of a father who can hardly bear the mantle of circumstance any longer.

Sirius takes Lyall’s hand on the kitchen table in solidarity and sits through a quiet resurgence of tears as Lyall squeezes his fingers like mooring. Eventually he centers himself and looks back up Sirius with drained conviction. “You have to find these pieces of driftwood, Sirius,” he eventually rasps softly, sitting back up in his chair and adjusting his spectacles, “or you’re going to drown. Please don’t say you should have gone in his place. _Please._ It would have ruined him to hear you say that. And I don’t think either of us can palate anymore fucking loss.”

A bitter and aimless chuckle colors the last of Lyall’s words, and Sirius nods as he swallows around his own tears.

“Alright,” he says roughly. “I’m sorry, Lyall, I’m so sorry.”

“Me too.” Lyall sips from his tea, weary and trodden but determined to keep on. Sirius envies the man’s strength in the face of tragedy for the umpteenth time. He’s silent for a moment, lost in tired though to look through the closed lace curtains as if he could see the village beyond, before speaking again; “Are you going to keep the flat?”

Sirius looks up at the question he hadn’t even thought to ask himself. Any normal person would probably sell as quickly as possible, shuck off the skin of the past and move out and on to somewhere brighter. But Sirius hasn’t known normal since the last words he said to Remus. Not until he took his first sip of Lyall’s tea and even then—ephemeral. He blinks at his hands before nodding slowly.

“Yeah,” he says with simple softness. “At least for now.”

—

_You Floo to my father’s house—I would know that address even if you hadn’t spread my ashes and instead left me interred beneath bedrock itself. I would have heard it through crust and basalt and thrummed with the memories attached to it._

_I miss my parents._

_I wonder if I might see mum, if I could tear myself away from this flat and see somewhere else, even. Still not sure how this works._

_I suppose she still must be at the Muggle hospital near nan’s old house, if any of this goes the way it seems so far. But maybe not—no magic blood. It’s sad to think about it that way, vaguely._

_I hope she isn’t lonely._

_When you return over the hearth, your eyes are smudged the way oil paint smudges; dry-brush eyes, you’ve been crying. I’ve watched you lose so many tears since I left, Sirius, and I can hardly believe you have any left to give for me._

_You don’t have to keep losing them, love, I’m right here._

_I wish I could kiss you._

_I’m right. Here._

_My hand passes through your shoulder and you shiver, absently moving to shut the cracked window by the record cabinet as if that were the reason for it._

_You were never quite comfortable with the spirits at school._

_Perhaps you could be comfortable with me someday soon._

_Perhaps you might see me someday._

_Soon._

—

To James Potter’s credit of character, he‘s never known how to take no for an answer.

Sirius buckles under the man’s incessant and all-encompassing compassion after two months of lonesomeness, finally sheared to his last layer by Lyall’s bid to _Find these pieces of driftwood, Sirius._ James is decidedly the densest piece in the saltiest ocean, and he floats well enough.

“This is everything then?”

James shoulders one of Sirius’ two rucksacks, nothing but clothing and the framed photo of him and Remus from ‘77– _Don’t look at it, don’t you dare,_ he’d placed it facedown atop his folded jumpers with a reverence reserved for relics in a museum, sure that he will one day be able to watch the laughing boys fondly in their frame but not today. Not yet. Not quite.

“Yeah, just about. Still own the place, so I can pop back for other bits if I need them.” Sirius smiles lamely, and both he and James know it’s a poor ruse but have enough sense not to comment on it.

The Basingstoke flat has become, by all counts, a mausoleum. Sirius quite thinks it does to stay that way. Perhaps in several weeks, months, years, he’ll be able to stand in the sitting room and watch the way the light slants through the window along the edges of the record player to revel in lovely memories of Remus reading in the sunbeam. But Sirius doesn’t trust himself so soon after with the delicacy of such things. Memories, for all their necessity, still burn.

“Lily is eager to see you,” James says gently. He lets Sirius take the floo first, and Sirius tries to ignore the way the grandfather clock yaps softly in farewell. He’s glad, faintly, that snapping off the extra hand didn’t ruin the weave of the spells knit into the hulking thing. He’ll miss it.

He grabs for the Floo powder and, as he turns to step into the hearth, flinches when it rattles a few seconds too late to be just an upset of his hands. Sirius bites down hard on the backs of his teeth when he thinks he smells a trace of Remus’ scent when he almost turns his face to look at the dish— _Stop this. Stop it. Quit torturing yourself, you need time away from this flat, you bloody heap._ Sirius takes an extra moment to squeeze his eyes shut and remind himself how to breathe steadily.

Sirius patently doesn’t look over his shoulder as he dashes the powder and tries not to choke on the feeling of emptiness that pulses through him.

He feels the warm slipstream of travel pull at his clothes before he lights on the Potters’ hearth, melting away some of the the knotted tension of Basingstoke, and as Sirius steps onto the carpet he feels delicate arms wrap around him in a motherly embrace before he can put down his bag.

Lily squeezes him tighter when Sirius tentatively returns the hug with one arm. “Lord alive, Sirius, I’ve been so worried about you,” she intimates, badly covering a jump in her shoulders with a swallowed swell of relieved tears. Sirius’ heart clenches, but he only nods into her hair. The coppery strands stick to his cheek in a way that feels familiar to Remus’ but without any of the old comfort. He steps back stiffly to stay the pitching sickness at the thought, and he covers the movement with a pale kiss to Lily’s forehead.

“Still here,” he says. His voice sounds strained. He doesn’t address it.

Lily swipes tidily at her eyes as she sniffs away her ruddy-faced moment and nods. “Thank fuck for that,” she replies, stark. Sirius’ eyebrows twitch up at the strength of her language, and she catches the meaning immediately with a wave of her hand while she wipes absently at her reddened nose. “Harry is at Fleamont’s for the weekend, he’s back tomorrow.”

James comes through the fireplace and pats Sirius gently on the shoulder. “Food? Drink? Sleep? Tell us what you need, Pads. Our house is yours.”

“Sleep,” Sirius says automatically, his unconscious speaking for him, and suddenly he feels the pull of the last several weeks’ weight on his limbs. Even _thinking_ feels heavy, laden thick with a disorienting fug of apathetic catastrophe. He draws a hand down his face which, he realizes with a tick of embarrassment, has gone unshaven for the past four days. He must look a perfect picture of disrepair. “Yeah. Please.”

“Here, spare room’s all yours,” James says gently as he nods his head back to indicate the short flight of stairs to their upper floor. Sirius follows him, each man carrying one of Sirius’ bags, and James leaves him to stand for a moment of thick silence between them in the tidy, fresh-smelling little guest room that was once Harry’s nursery.

“Do you—“ James stops himself with a small stammer around a low, thickened voice, the emotion in his throat evident from even behind the reflection of the lamp’s gentle glare on his glasses. “Are you going to be alright? I can’t...I could never imagine if Lily—I feel badly that I haven’t reached out much, am—have you needed us?” James’ voice breaks, terrible at fine-tuned emotions but so sincere it burns one’s heart to the root and back, and Sirius finds his eyes welling again along with his brother’s. “I’m so sorry, Sirius. 

Sirius gathers him into a rough and fraternal embrace in lieu of offering words that he knows won’t come anyways. He feels, as he digs his chin into the shoulder of James’ jumper to cry mute and desperate tears, that _I’m So Sorry_ has become the sordid carrion cry of this whole fucking farce of a tragedy—from himself to the empty air of the flat, from James to himself, from Lily, from Pete, from Lyall, from himself to the searing, prickling memory of Remus—it’s lost its meaning. It truly has, for “Sorry” can never encompass the gaping vacuum of life that has been torn away from all of them. “Sorry” is convenient because it exists, and so it tries to take the place of definition instead of digging deeper for finer purchase.

But “Sorry” is all they seem to have right now.

And so Sirius, nested for however long now in this quiet neighborhood alongside friends as good as family, is sorry.

He is so, so sorry.

—

_You’ve left, and I can’t say I blame you._

_This flat is a sad flat. Where two had been, one cannot comfortably take up the space anymore._

_But damn it all, Sirius, I miss you._

_You almost saw me before you took the Floo out. I managed to rattle the powder dish and you looked, you looked over at me, you almost looked right at me—!_  

_No matter._

_I can’t blame you for moving on._

_Perhaps I should learn to let go of this flat as well, quit letting it tie me here. They never taught us the potential of being a ghost in school. I’ll have to teach myself._

_No matter._

_I’m a quick study._

_I’ll wait a little longer though. If only to try and make you see me one last time._

_I have loved you too dearly to disappear from you without a trace, Sirius Black._

—

The night presses with less urgency now, as if the planet has had the grace to tip back a bit closer to her center. For the first time in the past three months, Sirius feels as though he might be able to breathe.

He’s taken a bottle of ale with him out to the roof, accessible through the casement in the spare room Sirius has only recently gotten used to calling his. The drink is half-gone, sipped out of rote rather than thirst as Sirius stares out over the dusk-cloaked neighborhood, and it dangles loosely by the neck in his fingers between knees drawn up to support his tired, listless arms.

 _He’s truly gone,_ Sirius has been thinking to himself for the past twenty minutes. It makes his mouth taste of filling cotton when he thinks around the words too closely, but it’s the truth. He’s dead. Remus isn’t coming back.

To his surprise, he doesn’t start crying. Relief shoots through him like a fizzled spell as he tips the bottle to his lips and sips deeply past the realization.

Remus is gone.

The window to his left scrapes open suddenly with a stuttering advancement that betrays Harry’s gangly little arms pushing at the glass. Sirius’ godson leans out over the sill to peer at him with worry that looks very much like Lily swimming in those wide, bespectacled eyes.

“Are you okay, Siri?”

Sirius smiles wanly. He nudges the bottle of ale behind him and stares out along the quiet twilight, the crickets chirruping in harmony with his internal voice echoing full of that mounting press of realization, _He’s dead, he’s gone, Remus Lupin has died._ A hollow peace flutters at the pit of Sirius’ throat—foreign, devastating, vaguely uncomfortable in a welcome sort of way. He holds in a sigh.

“No, I don’t think I am,” Sirius murmurs. “But that’s alright.”

“D’you want me to sit with you?”

“Please.”

Harry scrabbles out onto the roof with the unique alacrity of one made almost completely of knees and elbows, and Sirius conveniently forgets to ask the 7-year-old if he’s allowed up here.

“Are you sad?” Harry asks simply.

“Extremely.”

“Can I help?”

“I don’t know, Harry.”

“When I’m sad,” Harry starts, picking idly at the roof tile by his left foot, “mummy sings me songs.”

“Are you going to sing me songs then?” Sirius prods him, the hint of a true smile pulling at the corners of his mouth. It tugs just as well at the edges of his heart.

“No, I can’t sing,” Harry says with airy, boyish surety. “I’ll just sit with you, I think.”

“Sit away, Potter.”

The two sit in knit silence in the coil of early summer while Sirius’ insides finally start the long, slow trek of mending. He doesn’t know whether to be relieved or start mourning again for the passage of such a momentous slice of his life—sealed now, forever, in a quiet tomb shaped like the way Remus used to smile at him over the edge of his books.

“Mummy told me that Uncle Remus was very sick,” Harry says, with a gentleness that surpasses his years and punches past Sirius’ ribs into his heart. Sirius breathes evenly around a tremor of sadness and nods at Harry.

“He was,” he assures the boy, not able to say much else beyond even under the sweet guard of summer nighttime.

“Are you very sick too?” Harry hazards then with true worry, and fear hidden plainly in his godson’s subtle frown seizes Sirius’ throat with sharpened nails.

“No, Harry, Merlin no, I’m staying right here,” he says roughly. Harry’s bandy little shoulders relax with untold relief, and Sirius pulls him close against his side with one arm. He wrestles briefly with the choking press of emotion before clarifying; “I’m very _sad,_ and it will take a long time before I don’t hurt so much, but I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good,” Harry replies. He nods his head once with acceptance and pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose, staring out at the same swath of the neighborhood. Sirius wonders distantly what he might see out there with the blessed gift of youth and innocence. His eyebrows are still bunched at the center of his forehead though, a slight betrayal of inner conflict, so Sirius decides to help.

 _“She packed my bags last night pre-flight,  
__Zero hour nine AM;  
__And I'm gonna be high as a kite by then.  
__I miss the earth so much, I miss my wife;  
__It's lonely out in space_  
On such a timeless flight...” 

As he hears Sirius’ roughened, half-weak singing, Harry looks up with a giggle and a grin that could dazzle the stars; Sirius feels it warm the fatherly corners of his heart like hearthfire, and he feels a smile peek out through the edges of his mouth. For once, it isn’t forced.

Harry joins him, words he doesn't know the meaning behind in the slightest but has memorized from Lily’s favorite lullaby for her boy, and Sirius finds—accidentally, through the harmony of crowing at the stars judging him mutely from above—that shouting Elton into the night with his godson makes him feel less alone than any sordid try from within himself.

Sirius Black has always needed others to help him heal.  

He finds peace with that fact now, on the roof with his soul bared and bold, for the first time in his life.

—

_Three more weeks and I’ll pass._

_It’s always three, isn’t? I’m a proper Lazarus, if only without the body wrapped in linens. Without any body at all._

_Perhaps I’m afraid, then. Afraid we built too much of what we were on bodies and teeth and sweat—perhaps that’s why I left the way I did, because I was afraid to someday reach that place where I couldn’t hold you, touch you, fuck you, breathe you in with all that animal hunger we harbored across the years._

_In my avoidance, I’ve ended up exactly that way._

_Fear is a funny little thing, isn’t it?_

_Dictated always by the book of the moon, our silly lives entwined in the diary of this flat, this hovel, this perfectly sound place to call ours. I love it. I can’t recall if I ever thanked you as thoroughly as I ought to have for giving me this safety, this peace, this normalcy._

_Three weeks, Sirius. I just want to see you again, and if you can’t see me too I’ll go. I’ll let you move on._

_I suppose it’s selfish of me to hope you’ll keep wearing the ring._

_I’ll hope nonetheless._

—

Sirius finds small parts of himself waking up like pins-and-needles limbs as the weeks crawl onward.

He laughs, truly and openly, for the first time after four days with the Potters when Harry accidentally charms a teaspoon to shout dirty words at James. Amidst Lily’s scrambling to counter-charm it before Harry’s vocabulary grows by several eyebrow-raising syllables, as Sirius holds his sides and tries not to fall from the armchair, he sees Lily’s eyes brimming with clear and relieved tears. Fighting a smile, she scolds Harry with a voice that only wobbles once.

Sirius has a glass of wine again with James after six days, glad for his best mate’s resolve to quit smoking when Harry was born—Sirius has had his night sweats and cravings in spades, but he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to look again without retching at the little things that tore Remus away from him. It only took twenty-eight years, but Sirius is finally aware that he is less than invincible.

After three weeks, Sirius decides the stout little bookcase across from his bed is looking empty. He had honestly meant it when he’d joked at Remus that he was going to start reading his mother’s old volumes in Remus’ absence, and he figures it’s time to make good on the promise. If it hurts, it hurts. He’ll survive it. His new mantra has been _Fuck It, I’m Still Here._ It’s been working swimmingly.

“I’ll be back in a bit,” he calls to the house, James at work and Lily banging away in the kitchen with Harry scuttling around somewhere, and doesn’t wait for a response before he Floos out. Sirius thinks, as the stiff air of green flames engulf him, that he might do well to bring the bike back to Godric’s sometime soon. The weather is certainly good for it.

Sirius alights on the hearth at Basingstoke and waits several seconds before opening his eyes to see the emptiness, because that, he’s come to realize over hours of quiet self-reflection in the Potters’ sitting room, is what has scared him the most about facing the future alone. Emptiness. He was always afraid of small spaces as a boy, but now the yawning unknown of facing years without Remus, his comfort, an entire half of his bloody fucking _heart_ , is what plagues him with dread deep at his core. Sirius was no good at filing a space before Remus came along.

That’s why the flat had been so dearly, disastrously, beautifully wonderful for him.

Without Remus, there is no home. It’s just. A flat.

Sirius repeats that in his mind as he readies himself to open his eyes to what he knows will be the color and shape of familiar summer sun pouring in across the sofa, _Just a flat, it’s just a flat, just grab some of the books and go back, it’s just a flat_ —

It’s a just a flat.

Sirius blinks slowly to see what was once his haven undisturbed as he had left it.

But apparently left only as a flat, it has held on to what needs it most.

As Sirius struggles for breath around a gasped declaration of euphoric disbelief, Remus looks at him from before the window beside the record cabinet—a-shimmer at his edges and half-translucent in the shaft of daylight, surprised into a smile that puts all other light to shame.

— 

_You come through the hearth like a Hail Mary and I don’t think I’ve ever loved you more than in this moment. I watch you as you finally see me, and it’s the most beautiful thing I think I’ve ever witnessed._

_You go pale, paler, bone-pale and I think you might faint, but then there are tears in your eyes again and perhaps for the first time I thank the universe for the magic in my blood that has kept me here to feel this moment._

_You eleventh hour berk. I adore you._

_I can stay now, even though your hand passes right through mine—but this time you don’t shiver. You touch your ring and ask me how long I’ve been here, fuck, I look the same as you keep remembering, oh, have I really been with you the whole time? Why could you not see me before?_

_Only here, in the flat, I’m tied here, but yes, I’ve been trying to make you see me the whole time I’ve been aware but it hasn’t worked until now._

_You promise to stay then; you had thought of selling the place someday in the future, far away, after it all stopped hurting, but no longer—fuck, you’ll stay forever, you’ll stay till you rot, you’ll stay with me, I’m here, I’m back, you love me, you love me so bloody much._

_No longer, you repeat as you try to stroke my cheek, pass through again, crying and smiling and not minding because you can see me, speak to me, hear me talk to you again for the first time in months. I was silly to think our bodies were all that mattered. I see the stars in your eyes and I know now we’ve been tied together from within since the minute we met._

_No longer, I reply, smiling as well—it sparks me through with adoration to be earnest. Forever._

_For black is the color of my true love’s hair and nothing has ever mattered beyond. This is all that I have ever needed._

_You are here with me, and although my body is mist I am whole._

_I will remain with you always in this, our home._

  


_—fin—_

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry this took longer that expected--my computer died and work picked up and I had a whole host of other fires to put out, but I promise this was alive and churning the whole time :) Thank you so much, whether you've been reading since 2016 or whether you've only just come along to the series, for being here for this series. I've changed as a person and an author along the way, and I can only hope that's been reflected positively in the story. I love the relationship fostered between these two over any lines of fiction, whatever they may be, and I'm so glad to have a host of readers who have enjoyed watching it unfold with me.
> 
> There are other stories I have racketing around in my brain ready to come out soon, so absolutely stay tuned if you'd like to see more from me in the future. There are other things a-boil outside the realm of AO3 as well, and I'll be keeping snippets and info on project(s) that aren't fanfic coming steadily on my Tumblr (perhaps slowly at first--I have to collect my bearings as many other IRL things continue to slot themselves together, but I promise it's not a dead blog), same username as I've got here. Come by if you want to keep in touch as time winds forward!
> 
> Thank you all again, from every inch of my heart, for being here for this story <3


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